Abstract

Aristotle's Material Reductionist Account of History of Philosophy In his account of the flux of ideas, Aristotle searches the models of his predecessors to find an alternative cause for this; and he finds none. Indeed, no answer is given either by himself or by them as to why nature conforms to order or to no order at all. For this reason Aristotle’s bewildering multi‐variety of causes‐essences is not realisable unless this variety refers to an ideal of unity beyond it. The order, however, that accounts for this unity is beyond understanding in Aristotle. All that man can do is to dedicate himself to the futile pursuit of an ideal of unity. The pre‐Aristotelian philosophers and Aristotle himself resort to the language of myth to make an uneasy compromise between what we can do and what we cannot do regarding this realisation. This attribute of non‐realism is best ascribed to him by Thomas Aquinas; whereas Demetrius Cydones’ (1324‐1398) hellenised output of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica stresses a material reductionist strain as due to Aristotle’s limited understanding of this flux. To this end the functions of ratios and causal principles, once defined by his predecessors and by himself as well, are real because they are the only possible ones. However, any general statement about reality of the form “all is x” – where x is the pre‐Aristotelian idea of water, air, intelligence, love and strife, etc. – has been the result of confusion. We enmesh Truth with the above‐mentioned principles. However exclusive, necessary and sufficient these principles may be, they cannot give us irrefutable propositions regarding the idea of Truth about Reality.